Art, commerce and colonialism 1600–1800

Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800

This book forms part of the series Art and its Global Histories published by Manchester University Press in association with The Open University. The books in the series are:

European Art and the Wider World 1350–1550, edited by Kathleen Christian and Leah R. Clark

Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, edited by Emma Barker

Empire and Art: British India, edited by Renate Dohmen

Art after Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation, edited by Warren Carter

Art and its Global Histories: A Reader, edited by Diana Newall

Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800

Edited by Emma Barker

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

in association with

The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA

www.open.ac.uk

First published 2017

Copyright © 2017 The Open University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Barnard’s Inn, 86 Fetter Lane, London, EC4A 1EN (website www.cla.co.uk).

This publication forms part of the Open University module Art and its global histories (A344). Details of this and other Open University modules can be obtained from Student Recruitment, The Open University, PO Box 197, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ, United Kingdom (tel. +44 (0)300 303 5303; email general-enquiries@open.ac.uk).

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Emma Barker

Chapter 1  From Iberia to the Americas: Hispanic art of the colonial era

Piers Baker-Bates

Chapter 2  The Golden Age revisited: Dutch art in global perspective

Emma Barker

Chapter 3  Creative interactions: chinoiserie in eighteenth-century Britain

Clare Taylor

Chapter 4  Transatlantic architecture: classicism, colonialism and race

Elizabeth McKellar

Conclusion

Emma Barker

Index

Preface

This is the second of four books in the series Art and its Global Histories, which together form the main texts of an Open University Level 3 module of the same name. Each book is also designed to be read independently by the general reader. The series as a whole offers an accessible introduction to the ways in which the history of Western art from the fourteenth century to the present day has been bound up with cross-cultural exchanges and global forces.

Each book in the series explores a distinct period of this long history, apart from the third, which focuses on the art and visual culture of the British Empire, with particular reference to India. The present book, Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, examines the impact on European art and visual culture of the growth of global trade and the expansion of colonial settlements during these two centuries.

All of the books in the series include teaching elements. To encourage the reader to reflect on the material presented, each chapter contains short exercises in the form of questions printed in bold type. They are followed by discursive sections, the end of which is marked by .

The four books in the series are:

European Art and the Wider World 1350–1550, edited by Kathleen Christian and Leah R. Clark

Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, edited by Emma Barker

Empire and Art: British India, edited by Renate Dohmen

Art after Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation, edited by Warren Carter.

There is also a companion reader:

Art and its Global Histories: A Reader, edited by Diana Newall.

Introduction

Emma Barker

This book examines the impact on the visual arts of Europe’s interaction with the wider world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1600, the initial contacts of the ‘age of exploration’ had been consolidated into a worldwide commercial network of transoceanic shipping routes, greatly increasing the amount of goods being transferred between continents. Over the next two hundred years, the European powers competed fiercely for control of the global economy, building up vast fleets, founding overseas trading companies and establishing colonial settlements. These developments helped to shape European art of this period in many different ways, as will be shown here by examining images and objects that range from cathedrals to wallpaper, from portraits to porcelain, from still-life paintings to classical villas. Demonstrating their connections with commerce and colonialism not only leads to a better understanding of the history of art, but also sheds light on this critical epoch in world history. The expansion of Christianity across the globe, slavery in the New World, the transformation of European lifestyles and the idea of Europe itself can all be illuminated by making these kinds of connections.

Until recently, however, the history of European art between the Renaissance and the modern era was written almost entirely without reference to these larger histories. The omission is no doubt at least partly due to what is known as Eurocentrism, an outlook that takes the achievements of Western civilisation as its main point of reference and, in so doing, overlooks the appropriation of resources, the oppression of peoples and the destruction of cultures that accompanied Europe’s rise to global dominance. Within the discipline of art history, this kind of outlook has been compounded by a focus on highly crafted works produced for wealthy patrons that often glorify their power and justify the status quo. The discipline’s narrow focus also reflects the extent to which it has been shaped by the legacy of the academies of art, the first of which were founded in Italy in the late sixteenth century. By 1800, they had been established as far afield as St Petersburg (1757) and Mexico City (1785). Seeking to dignify art and artists by gaining recognition for the so-called fine arts of painting, sculpture and architecture as gentlemanly pursuits undertaken without thought of financial gain, these institutions steadfastly upheld the fiction that high art had nothing whatever to do with vulgar commerce.

A large body of recent scholarship, by contrast, expands the traditional remit of art history to consider a broadly defined visual culture (one that includes the decorative arts and design as well as the fine arts) in relation to commerce, colonialism and other forms of cross-cultural contact. The present book builds on this scholarship, but breaks new ground in focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than being framed with reference to an early modern period that extends from 1500 to 1800. In so doing, it seeks to highlight the extent to which the more substantial and systematic mode of cross-cultural engagement that emerged towards the end of the sixteenth century differed from what preceded it; in the words of the historian Timothy Brook, the period after 1600 was ‘an age of second contacts, when sites of first encounter were turned into places of repeated meeting’.¹ The language of ‘encounter’ and ‘meeting’ runs the risk, however, of downplaying the damaging consequences for the rest of the world of the intense rivalry between the European powers for commercial dominance during these two centuries of ‘proto-globalisation’.² Of particular significance in this respect is the transatlantic slave trade, which grew steadily during this period to reach a peak towards the end of the eighteenth century, when some 80,000 enslaved Africans are estimated to have been shipped annually to the Americas.

The four chapters in this book each explore the nexus of art, commerce and colonialism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in relation to a specific European nation. They are ordered so as to reflect the shifting balance of global power over the course of the period, moving from Spain to the Netherlands and ending with Britain, together with the newly independent United States, in the two final chapters. (Other European powers, notably Portugal and France, are discussed in this introduction.) The chapter contents also reflect the difference between Europe’s relations with Asia, where its efforts were largely focused on coastal trading bases, and its relations with the Americas, where large-scale colonisation took place. Chapters 2 and 3 consider how the influx of exotic goods, primarily from Asia, helped to transform art and design in Europe while Chapters 1 and 4 discuss the transmission of European-style art and architecture to colonial (and formerly colonial) territories in the Americas. Although the examples are drawn from an expanded range of images and objects, the approach adopted here remains an art-historical one, with the emphasis on the decorative and communicative features of visual culture rather than the more strictly utilitarian purposes of material culture. Before taking a closer look, however, it is necessary to survey the major developments in Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

1 European rivalries on a global stage

In 1600, the European power exercising the greatest global sway was the Spanish monarchy, which controlled huge swathes of the Americas, along with the Philippines. Moreover, when Philip II inherited the throne of Portugal as well in 1580, the kings of Spain had become the ultimate rulers of Portuguese territories in Brazil, as well as forts and trading posts along the coasts of Africa, India and the Far East. (The two crowns remained united until 1640.) It is now customary to refer to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, but, at the time, Europe’s only acknowledged emperor was the one who ruled the Holy Roman Empire. Although the Emperor Charles V had been king of Spain as well, he divided his dominions between his brother, Ferdinand, and his son, Philip, when he abdicated in 1556. This event is commemorated in a seventeenth-century painting by the Flemish artist Frans Francken the younger, which shows Charles enthroned between his successors, surrounded by emblems of the Habsburg dynasty’s power and majesty (Plate 0.1). On the lower right, kneel female personifications of America, Africa and Asia; the turbaned figure behind them has been identified as the ruler of Tunis, an ally and vassal of Spain. On the lower left, Neptune on his chariot indicates that the Habsburgs rule the seas as well as on land; fluttering above his head is a banner bearing Charles’s motto, Plus Ultra, ‘Still Further’, signifying that their power has no limits, but extends across the globe.³ The motto was taken over by Philip and his successors on the Spanish throne.

In other words, this picture upholds a claim to rule the entire world, which, by the time it was painted, had been taken over by the Spanish monarchy. As you might expect, Francken was himself a subject of the monarchy, Philip having inherited not only Spain and its American territories but also the Netherlands and much of Italy. The same allegorical imagery was harnessed for propagandist purposes by Philip’s successors throughout the period covered by this book, often in frescoes adorning royal palaces and other works of art on a much grander scale than this small picture. These works assert Spain’s claim to be a universal monarchy, one surpassing even the Roman Empire since its dominions extend as far as America, which had been unknown to the ancient world; this claim rested on the monarchy’s commitment to spreading the Christian faith throughout the globe, meaning that its power enjoyed divine sanction.⁴ In the allegory of Charles V’s abdication, the Muslim ruler standing behind and gesturing towards Asia, Africa and America both recalls the earlier success of Spanish monarchs in expelling Islam from the Iberian peninsula and prefigures the hoped-for conversion of the rest of the world to Christianity. At the same time, however, the treasures being offered by the three non-European continents and the exotic artefacts lying on the ground beside them serve as a reminder of the more mercenary motives that contributed to Spain’s transformation into a global power.

Plate 0.1 Frans Francken II, Allegory of the Abdication of Emperor Charles V in Brussels, c.1630–40, oil on panel, 134 × 172 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

What led the Spanish to remain in the Americas had been the discovery there of precious metals, regular shipments of which across the Atlantic enriched the royal treasury throughout this period. With the conquest of the Philippines, Spain also gained access to Asian markets; some of its mineral wealth was diverted to them in order to pay for luxury goods, such as Chinese silk and porcelain. From 1573 onwards, the so-called Manila galleons sailed every year across the Pacific to Acapulco, from where the goods were transported overland to Mexico City and thence from the eastern port city of Veracruz to Seville. In this respect, however, Spain lagged far behind Portugal, which had established its own sea route to Asia via Africa before 1500 and endeavoured to monopolise the hugely lucrative import of spices from the East Indies into Europe. The Portuguese too were motivated by more than commercial considerations alone; from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, their monarchy strongly supported the missionary endeavours of the Jesuit order in Asia.⁵ The impact of the missionary presence is evident from lacquer screens in the so-called Nanban (or Namban) style depicting the arrival of a Portuguese ship in a Japanese port; in this example, the disembarking merchants are greeted by black-robed Jesuits, behind whom can be seen a church with a cross on its roof (Plate 0.2). After the union of the crowns, however, the Portuguese faced new challenges from Spain’s enemies, most notably the newly independent Dutch Republic in the Northern Netherlands, which seized most of their trading bases in Asia and (for a time) part of Brazil during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Plate 0.2 Kano Naizen, Nanban folding screen, c.1606, wooden lattice covered with paper, gold leaf, polychrome tempera painting, silk, lacquer, copper gilt, 178 × 366 cm. National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon. Photo: © MNAA – Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.

The arrival of the Dutch as leading players on the global stage was marked in 1602 by the foundation of the Dutch East India Company, which remained the world’s most powerful commercial organisation for over a century. Another company that had been set up with the aim of trading with Asia in England two years earlier, the East India Company, struggled to keep up. Having failed in its attempt to break into the spice trade in the East Indies, the English company instead concentrated its efforts on the Indian subcontinent, from which its principal import was textiles. Nevertheless, these two organisations together inaugurated a new model for Europe’s activities across the globe at the start of the seventeenth century.⁶ In the case of Spain and Portugal, the monarchy sought to exert direct control over its subjects’ overseas ventures; government bodies were established to administer trade and shipping while viceroys or governors were appointed to rule territories on the king’s behalf (British governors in colonial America had far less authority).⁷ By contrast, the Dutch and British governments endeavoured to promote and regulate economic activity abroad by indirect means, such as charters that granted an exclusive right to trade with a designated part of the world to a joint-stock company; these companies were also granted extensive powers, including the right to wage war and to mint coins, in the regions where they traded.⁸ In this model, the government profited not by expropriating mineral wealth and other resources, as did Spain, but from monopolies, tariffs and taxes.

Plate 0.3 Europe’s trade routes to the Americas, 1600–1800.

Plate 0.4 Europe’s trade routes to Africa and Asia 1600–1800.

Moreover, whereas the Iberian monarchies operated in close collaboration with the Roman Catholic Church, missionary endeavour was not a priority for the trading companies set up by the Protestant powers of northern Europe. Their more narrowly commercial agenda meant that the Dutch became the only foreign merchants allowed to enter Japan after 1639 when the authorities there, angered by the success of the Jesuits in gaining Christian converts, expelled the Portuguese; even so, the Dutch were confined to Dejima, an artificial island constructed for the purpose in the harbour at Nagasaki. Nevertheless, both their overseas ventures and those of Britain in the Americas were legitimised by reference to religion, only their claim was that they were motivated by a high-minded commitment to liberating the world from the oppressive power of Catholic Spain.⁹ Protestant propagandists drew on reports of the brutal treatment of the indigenous population of the Americas by the Spanish conquistadores to elaborate what became known in the twentieth century as the ‘Black Legend’. The Flemish-born engraver Theodore de Bry backed up accounts of these atrocities with graphic images in his multivolume history of America, which was published between 1590 and 1634; it was one of several illustrated books published in northern Europe around 1600 that present a critical view of Spanish (and Portuguese) colonialism while also implicitly justifying European rule by depicting indigenous peoples in a less than positive light (Plate 0.5).¹⁰ The Black Legend stood as a cautionary tale that allowed Spain’s enemies to boast of their own virtue in relying on commerce rather than conquest in their own dealings with the non-European world.¹¹ In reality, however, the distinction between conquest and commerce was far from clear-cut.

What united all the European powers to a greater or lesser extent, moreover, was a commitment to state intervention in the economy to maximise the nation’s share of global trade and thereby to boost its fortunes relative to its rivals. The various policies adopted for this purpose were collectively dubbed ‘the mercantile system’ by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776).¹² The classic instance of mercantilism is provided by France during the reign of Louis XIV (r.1643–1715), when aggressive economic policies went hand in hand with and helped to fund the incessant wars waged by the king. The policies pursued by his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in order to reinforce France’s position as Europe’s richest and most powerful nation included the setting up of an East India company, the Compagnie royale des Indes orientales, to compete with the Dutch and British in 1664. It failed in this aim, but nevertheless contributed to the growth of the trade in Asian goods, which, by the eighteenth century, reached many more consumers than hitherto. Luxury items such as Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquer that would once have been displayed in the curiosity cabinets of princes could now be found in daily use in wealthy households across Europe as well as those of colonial citizens across the Americas.¹³ The strongest area of growth in the late seventeenth century was the trade in Indian textiles, with patterned cottons known as calico and chintz being especially popular (so much so that several European nations, starting with France in 1686, attempted to ban their import in order to protect domestic textile production).¹⁴ By the early eighteenth century, the once dominant Dutch East India Company was losing out to its British counterpart, which henceforward accounted for the bulk of Asian goods imported into Europe.

For the European powers competing for global hegemony, the Asian trade was rivalled in importance by the Atlantic economy, which supplied a range of lucrative commodities, including sugar, tobacco, coffee and chocolate.¹⁵ It was in order to meet the demand of European consumers for sugar that a new system of plantation agriculture based on slave labour was developed in the Americas from around 1650 onwards. Slaves had first been imported for this purpose in the late sixteenth century by the Portuguese in Brazil; other nations followed suit, mainly in the Caribbean, which became the centre of sugar production. By the early eighteenth century, the slave economy also prevailed on the tobacco plantations in the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland. The Dutch, British and French all established companies in order to exploit the transatlantic trade in slaves, sugar and other commodities, but it was the French who became pre-eminent in the Atlantic economy, even though the West India Company set up by Colbert proved short-lived.¹⁶ By the mid-eighteenth century, Frenchcontrolled Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was the most profitable colony in the New World, generating vast wealth for the plantation owners. Highly revealing in this respect is a portrait by the French painter François-Hubert Drouais, which shows the son of the island’s then governor pointing in a proprietorial fashion towards a map of Saint-Domingue (Plate 0.6).¹⁷ Of the slaves who produced the sugar to which his family owed his fortune there is of course no sign.

Plate 0.5 Theodore de Bry, the Spanish commander Vasco Núñez de Balboa punishes Panamanian Indians accused of the sin of sodomy by setting his dogs on them, engraving in Americæ pars quarta. Sive, insignis & admiranda historia de reperta primùm Occidentali India à Christophoro Colombo anno M.CCCCXCII, Frankfurt, 1594.The British Library, London, shelfmark G.6628.(1). Photo: © British Library, London/Bridgeman Images.

For prosperous Europeans in the early eighteenth century, the expansion of global trade was an unalloyed benefit. Writing in 1711, the essayist Joseph Addison celebrated the vast array of goods from all over the world now available in London: ‘Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare necessaries of life, but Traffick gives us a great variety of what is useful, and at the same time supplies us with everything that is convenient and ornamental.’¹⁸ After mid-century, however, a more sombre view emerged. In The Wealth of Nations, for example, Smith still maintained that commerce was generally beneficial, but, considering ‘the discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies’, he acknowledged: ‘To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.’¹⁹ Both perspectives can be seen to inform recent scholarship on this period. Increasing attention has been paid since the 1980s to the way that the globalisation of trade brought together objects, people and ideas from across the world. A key concept in the literature is the ‘Atlantic world’, which designates a vast contact zone spanning the continents of Africa, America and Europe; another term, ‘Eurasia’, similarly serves to assert the strength of commercial and cultural ties across the entire land mass.²⁰ Nevertheless, the impact of post-colonial studies and related critical perspectives means that no scholar today can be oblivious to the human costs of these developments, not just for the colonised and enslaved but also for the poor within Europe.²¹ The challenge is to try to do justice to both sides of the equation.

Plate 0.6 François-Hubert Drouais, The Comte de Vaudreuil,